CHAPTER TWELVE
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MARY
Dora went past me at the elevators with her keys in her teeth, and Luca Varela stood in the doorway of his own office holding my new bank card up between two fingers.
“Mary Corinne Warren. Your signature sample cleared, Mary Corinne Warren. This is the card they finally sent.”
“You’ve said it twice.” I had my hand out for it and he was in no hurry about that either.
“The bank got three signatures last week. Tonight I get that face.” He turned the card over and studied the blank back of it. “It’s a good name. It’s got an unnecessary middle in it, like a good sentence.”
He put it in my hand. His jacket was off, his sleeves up, ink along the side of Luca’s middle finger.
Somebody had opened that account for me in a room I have never been in. The fourteenth floor smelled of warm toner and lemon oil, and an elevator chimed down the shaft with the last of the associates in it.
“I want the paper on Danny’s markers. Nicolas said he’d get it. That was two days ago.”
Luca sat down on the front edge of his desk and did not give me the pause first.
“I can’t pull cage paper. That’s his building, his floor, his cashiers. Keep asking him and don’t get quieter about it.”
“Then who can?”
“Nicolas, and nobody in this city can make him hurry.” He turned his hands over, palms up. “You knew that before you got in the elevator.”
“That’s not an answer, that’s a—”
“It’s the whole answer.” Luca said it over me and I let him, which I do not do. “My brother told you he’d get it and he hasn’t. I’m not going to stand in my own office and tell you the mail’s been slow. Saying that to you costs me a conversation with him I’d have paid to avoid.”
Nicolas had said he would get it, and in this family that is supposed to be the end of a sentence. I looked at the Rothko on the north wall instead of at Luca. Six o’clock made the red in it look like the inside of a mouth.
“You could have said that on the phone.” I wiped my palms down my hip, which is what I do when there’s no apron on me.
“I could have. Then I wouldn’t have gotten to watch you decide whether to be rude to me.”
“That suit’s a crime and somebody should be prosecuted.”
“It’s Neapolitan and it cost more than your oven, and I’m going to think about what you just said for a week.” He looked delighted, which he does when he loses, and that is the most dangerous thing about him. “Say the part about prosecution again.”
“No.”
“Please.”
I had come twelve minutes across town furious about a debt that was never mine, and I stood in his doorway laughing at him with the card going soft in my fist.
He got off the desk and went past me to the door and stood there with his hand on it.
“I’m locking this door. You can leave whenever you want, and I’d rather you didn’t.”
My pulse came up under my jaw before I had decided a single thing. The deadbolt went over loud into an empty floor. I put the card down on the credenza beside his appointment book so my hands would have nothing left in them.
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Luca’s west window had been a view all afternoon and was in the middle of stopping. The light went out of it in stages and the glass began handing the room back instead, and I arrived in it a piece at a time. The shape of me first. Then the dress. Then my face.
“Stand there. Look at the window, not at me. I’m going to tell you what’s in it.”
He crossed the carpet and stopped behind me without touching me. Close enough that I got bergamot and the cold-office smell that lives in his shirts.
“Luca—”
“Shoulders. Freckles across the tops of them and across your nose, and I’ve been counting those badly since the day you signed.”
My hands wanted the hem of an apron. There was nothing to hold.
“You’re—”
“Quiet. The backs of your arms. The width of you across the shoulder, which was the first thing I ever saw of you and is the thing I think about in meetings I’m paid to attend.”
He found the zip at my back and took it down to the base of my spine. The dress came off my hips and onto the carpet, and he kept talking the whole time it fell.
“God, you’re gorgeous. I want that on the record and I want it said slowly.” He said it to my face in the glass and did not hurry one syllable of it.
The clasp went. He named my tits before the bra hit the floor, the weight of them and the way they sit and my nipples going hard in a room he keeps too cold for human beings. His thumb crossed the burn on my left forearm and did not stop there and did not ask about it.
“Nipples. I’m going to have the left nipple in my mouth before the hour’s out and the right nipple after it, and I’m telling you now so it isn’t a surprise.”
“Your belly.” My hands came up over my middle without being sent, and I watched them do it in the glass.
“Your belly again, because you didn’t like it the first time.
Your hips. Your ass, which I’ve had a private opinion about since the elevator.
Your thighs, and I’m going to have my mouth on your cunt on that desk, and I wanted you to know it before I touched you.
Your pussy. You flinch at that word and I intend to wear the flinch out of you. ”
“And the weight of you. I’ve thought about the weight of you in rooms where I was being paid to think about other things.”
He stopped. My eyes had gone down to the carpet somewhere around the word belly and stayed there.
“Look at you. Look at what you’ve been apologizing for since you got here.”
“I’m not—”
“Then hold your own eyes. I’m not saying another word until you do.”
The glass was bronze at the edges and going black in the middle. I brought my eyes up in it and made them stay.
“There she is.”
Grant Halloway came into my head uninvited, buttoning his shirt with his back to me in a rented room off Bird Road. He said greedy. He said it to the mirror and not to me, and then he asked whether I wanted anything out of the kitchen.
I have carried that word around like keys to a place I don’t live in.
Luca’s hand came flat and low across my belly and spread.
“Plenty. That’s the word. Say it.”
“Plenty.”
I said it to the carpet. He waited.
“Again. At the window this time, not at the floor.”
“Plenty.”
His other hand went between my thighs from behind, his knuckles dragging up my pussy, and I opened for it before I’d agreed to anything.
“You’re so wet I can hear it, and I’d like you to know that’s the best thing that’s happened to me this year.” He was smiling. I could hear that too.
Two fingers in my pussy, his thumb on my clit, his mouth on the back of my neck, his cock hard against my ass through the wool. He did not stop narrating me to the window for one second of it.
“That’s your clit and that’s my hand and that’s your cunt trying to keep my fingers, and I want it on the record that I asked for none of this and got all of it.”
“I still owe two point four million dollars and you’re telling me about my thighs.”
He laughed against my neck. His fingers went deeper in my pussy and stayed there.
“The contract doesn’t say one word about this room. Mine tonight. The money keeps until Thursday.”
His other hand came up and found a nipple and rolled it, then the other nipple.
His thumb went flat on my clit and stayed, and my pussy closed on his fingers, and I came standing up with my palms on cold glass and my breath fogging a piece of the city out.
I would have signed that contract again for this alone. I didn’t say so.
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Luca turned me around in his own locked office and got his hands under me. He set me up on the burned edge of the desk, pushed my knees wide, and looked at my pussy before he said anything. His cock was still shut in that Neapolitan suit.
“Hold on to the desk and stop being polite. I want to hear the whole thing.” The desk edge was warm where I had been sitting on it.
Then his mouth was on my cunt with his hands spread under my ass, his tongue on my clit, and he talked into me while he did it. He said perfect. He said plenty into me so that it went up my spine instead of into my ears.
There was a sentence I’d been holding on to about the paper and Danny and what I came here for, and it went. It didn’t go quietly. He took my clit into his mouth and my heel found his shoulder and my hand found his hair.
He said something else into my pussy and I lost most of that too.
“Perfect. Your thighs are perfect and I’m going to be unbearable about it for the rest of my life.”
“I can’t—”
“You can. Look at the window while you’re doing it.”
I came on his mouth with his tongue still on my clit, the burned desk edge printing into my thighs, and no idea what I sounded like.
He got his belt open and his cock out, and I put my heels in the small of his back and pulled his cock into me before he’d finished whatever sentence he was on. He didn’t finish it. He started another one.
“That’s my cock and that’s your cunt, and I’d like the record to show which of us is having the better evening.”
He kept it going the whole time. My tits in his hands, my nipples between his fingers, his thumb back on my clit, what my pussy was doing to his cock and what he intended to do about it, and my name in the middle of it in all three of its parts, the way he’d started.
Then he told me what he was going to do before he did it. He pulled his cock out of my pussy and did it across my belly, and said thank you afterward like a man leaving a good restaurant.
I had been bought. I was on a desk in a locked office and I had stopped waiting to feel bad about it.
The rain came against the black glass then and did not do one thing about the heat.
He put me in his chair with his jacket over me and hung my dress over the arm of it.
He poured out what was left in the espresso cup, cold since four, and I drank it anyway because he handed it to me.
When I opened my eyes he was on the edge of the desk again with his shirt open and his hair wrecked.
“There she is.”
“Don’t start.” My voice came out of me sounding like somebody who had been asleep.
“I’m going to start. I’ll start every time I get a look at you, and you’ll get used to it or you won’t.” He meant it, which is the trouble with him.
I looked down at myself under his jacket, at my belly and my thighs and my nipples still up in his cold air, and at the shine his mouth had left on me. The sentence I’ve said about my own body my whole life did not come. It has not come back since.
He crouched in front of the chair and put the cup in one hand and the bank card in the other.
“There’s a party Thursday night. Wear something that fits, let all three hundred of them look, and then come home and tell me they did.”